Wedge

I can live with the line being removed from the homepage. There's already the record being indicated there, so it's okay to remove the record from the homepage; I can also live with the record being removed from the Stats page, as long as the Online stats are kept in the daily stats.
I'm okay with the 'current day' connection number being removed too, since it can be found in the daily stats, so whatever.
I'm also okay with the daily online stats being hidden from view if you're not allowed to see them.

All in all, it's important to take into account that some admins, at some point in their forum's existence, will rely on these statistics to find more strength to work on their contents. It may be right or wrong, but it doesn't matter: if it's important to some people, we shouldn't remove it entirely.
Granted, it will NOT be important to even a minor portion of regular users, so it's all right to remove everything from *their* view, but admins..? They should still be able to see that.

Regarding guests, I think we agreed a long time ago (although you before me!) that it's okay not to start sessions for guests, and not record them in any kind of statistics, but I'd still like to record them in the Who's Online page, as per their IP address, and show what page they're currently visiting, and whether they're a bot or not. Again, this is the kind of thing that admins may want to know. It's only of interest in the Who's Online page, so I'm pretty sure we can save some processing work outside of these pages, apart of course from recording activity to the log_online table or something.
Still, I'm not sure what takes the most processing time for guests-- session work, or database write work..?xenForo doesn't get everything right...
I, for one, would never have bought it. I'd have bought IPB, had I been forced into buying some forum software. Had I been forced into using some other forum software, though, I wouldn't have bought anything, I would have forked SMF into something cool with a media gallery, a rewritten JS/CSS engine, things like that... Hmm, that's a good idea, actually. I should do that...

So, in short: I chose SMF because I liked it better than the competition. While I have no qualms with removing things from SMF that were short-sighted, I don't think that "just because someone else does it differently", it's reason enough to question a feature that's already in SMF and Wedge, and don't forget that removing stuff will also get you support requests like, "My forum ain't working properly!", "How do I put this feature back into Wedge?", or "You should remove your stupid [Wedge-specific new feature that we all like but take some adjusting to] instead of [SMF-specific old feature that this person liked], sucker! I'm off to [SMF fork that just started and is obviously not going to take off, but whatever your fancy], and [expletive] you!"

I, for one, would like to minimize the number of support requests, be they paid or not...

That's, basically, all I had to say about the subject, I think...Back in the day, when I cared about stats, I never used GA, for two reasons:
- it always gave very small numbers, like 10x smaller than SMF gave me, so I didn't trust it much,
- I always got NSL issues with their script, and at the time, it tended to make Opera go cwaaaazy...

So, I was quite happy to have a simple stats page.

What about a link or button to the info center stuff, @Noa you have some great points there also, support and the GA thing, as far as I know GA is still the same at reading your stats, and the link may take out some clutter on the front page and the user/admin will still be happy!

Coffee Time!

regards,
Maxx

Yes it is. The question is not 'should we remove it', at least not immediately. It becomes 'why do they do it differently?' XF does it differently because they believe the majority of owners don't care and would rather use GA to do it anyway.There's a very, very good reason for that: bots are not counted. Bots account for a *surprising* percentage of users.

Right now there are 15 guests, 3 users. 1 of those guests is listed as a known bot, but of the other 14 guests, 5 of those are bots that we currently do not track. (But I'm adding the ones I can see to the list so we can differentiate them)

I'd say, they don't do it because they started their stuff from scratch, and there are tons of things they couldn't bother to implement before they actually went 'gold'...Does Google keep track of all existing bots anyway..? :P

And yes, this is probably the reason, but I'm thinking that they were very, very liberal with what a bot is...

If it were entirely up to me I would have dropped even the topics' view counter... :angel:

Looks like UptimeRobot (which isn't in the official list -- should I commit my addition?), Panopta and AhrefsBots are in there ALL THE TIME... Impressive. What a bunch of loser bots...

@emanuele, are you doing it in Elk, then..? ;)
Yeah, topic views aren't very important in general, but sometimes -- sometimes -- when you're posting a message and you're desperate for an answer, looking at the view count is a way to pass the time, ah ah...
IIRC, view count only records members..? Hmm no, I probably don't remember well, hmm...

UptimeRobot visits every 5 minutes to see if the site's up or not (and hands out RSS feeds about it), the others I'm not sure about what they are but they are regular bot visitors who seem to be crawlers of some kind.

View count used to count everyone, I believe we changed it to count only non-robots (but that still depends on having the robots set up in the first place)

I added Panopta and Ahsomething to my robots.txt file, dunno about UptimeRobot yet, though...

I have to propose it...but I suppose that there are many people that want it... :( ...but...but...
And ask questions like: "Come on 100 views and not a single answer!!! ANSWER ME!!!11!!1!"

50 messages! :D

I wonder why we place so much importance on these numbers that, in the scheme of things, really don't make that much sense.

I find it interesting that WordPress does not keep a view count per article. Or if it does, it's not actually shown in their ACP anywhere I can find. I wonder what the logic of not doing so is.

There are certainly cases on sm.org of threads having obscenely high view counts unnaturally quickly (rising tens of thousands inside an hour)

Another thing with topic views, is that without them, you lose an entry in the stats page, which is not always the same as topic replies, although we could rework this to only request topics that aren't in both stat columns, etc... :^^;:

Nope, WP has never supported this. They expect you to rely exclusively on external statistics tools. It wasn't pleasant.

But that's the thing: if you're using external statistics tools, they're likely to be more accurate... or if you don't care about them, you don't have the overhead of tracking them.

We're back to the notion of 'if you don't care, why have the hit, but if you do care, you'll use something more accurate anyway'